An Introduction to LinkedIn Marketing for B2C

Most B2C companies are actively engaged in social media marketing (SMM) to some degree. SMM is a great way to reach a captive audience. Businesses of all types and sizes use SMM to pour leads into the tops of their funnels. However, most B2C companies never consider LinkedIn in their social media strategy.

Isn’t LinkedIn for B2B?

LinkedIn is a must for B2B marketing. Over 178 million US-based professionals are on LinkedIn, and four out of five have decision-making roles. That’s a no-brainer. But the same audience can be leveraged for B2C.

So how can that massive LinkedIn audience be leveraged for B2C?

Once again, over 178 million people, or roughly ⅓ of the adults in the United States, are on LinkedIn. They’re business professionals doing business, but they’re also people who need products and services the same as anyone else.

Using LinkedIn’s sophisticated campaign manager for advertising, you can dial in on leads based on demographic, economic, and psychographic data. 

What do I need to start marketing on Linkedin?

• Company Page
• Buyer Persona
• Lead Qualification Criteria

Company Page

A LinkedIn Page is a valuable business listing resource. It allows other companies, potential employees, and partners to interact with you in a professional context and can be a beneficial way to express your brand. You can read Linkedin’s best practices for creating a page here.

To set up a Linkedin company page, you’ll need a Linkedin profile; if you don’t have one, create one here.

You can read Linkedin’s best practices for creating a page here.

Buyer Persona

Before you begin a marketing campaign, you’ll need to establish your buyer attributes or persona. You can dial in your campaign audience by tailoring it to your buyer persona. Learn more about creating high-value buyer personas.

Lead Qualification

Lead qualification is another consideration when building your audience. You’ll be able to pre-screen by how well you customize your audience based on qualifying factors such as age, income, and geographic location.

Manage your LinkedIn ads with Campaign Manager

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager is an incredibly powerful tool. It allows you to create, measure, and optimize LinkedIn ads from a single web-based app.

Objective

In Campaign Manager, you begin by setting an objective based on your goals. These goals can be awareness (Brand Awareness), consideration (Website Visits), or conversions (Lead Generation).

Goal-based stages allow you to either build a funnel through buyer stages or reach buyers at the stage that they are in currently.

Audience

You can define your target audience by geographic location, age, gender, education level, group membership, and general interest (Arts and Entertainment, Society and Culture, etc.).

This is where your buyer personas come in. Strong buyer personas will help you refine your targeting. You can also exclude specific attributes to tighten your targeting further.

Budget

Linkedin Ads run on an auction platform, similar to Google or Facebook ads. 

There are three pricing models depending on your goals:

• CPM - Cost-per-thousand-impressions for driving brand awareness
• CPC - Basic cost-per-click to generate link traffic
• CPS - Cost-per-send for sponsored ads through LinkedIn

Developing the right LinkedIn marketing strategy is dependent on your personas and your goals. Establishing those beforehand will help you to determine the best budget and timeframe for your campaigns.

LinkedIn provides a huge audience of potential customers with sophisticated marketing tools that can target very specific segments. Using buyer personas to guide audience building, B2C companies can reach that audience with a very high degree of relevancy. With acquisition costs going up and the increased difficulty in winning customers' attention,  LinkedIn is a valuable tool to fill out your marketing efforts.

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